The present day telephone system provides means for its subscribers to verbally communicate with one another. The verbal communications must occur in real time and require that the sender and recipient have simultaneous access to their telephone stations for communication. If the sender is unable to initially place the call at a time when the recipient has access to his telephone, the sender must continue to repeat the call until the recipient is present. Similarly, if the sender desires to send the same verbal message to a number of recipients, he must repeat this process of establishing telephone contact with each recipient and repeating the message. Thus, the present day method of delivering verbal communications is time consuming, and in the business community the time spent in such present day verbal communications is inefficient and reduces personal productivity.
While auxiliary devices, such as telephone recording systems, may be installed for individual telephone sets, such devices do not fill the need for the rapid and efficient delivery of verbal messages in the business community. A need has thus arisen for a centralized telecommunications system which eliminates many of the inconveniences, inefficiency and time consuming requirements of the existing telephone network.
One solution to this problem has been the very recently developed voice message systems that receive audio messages from telephone stations for storage and later retrieval by another party. Normally, the user must access an individual addressee and direct a message to this addressee. For multiple addressees, there is only limited ability available in the present systems to access all addressees with the same message and even more limitations for allowing the addressee to respond. In view of these limitations, there exists a need for allowing more versatility in addressing groups of addressees and in providing members of the group to reply.